Wedding Season

"Wedding season" almost sounds like a Sex and the City Episode. Or, for Americans, it may conjure thoughts of _____ (insert your favorite sport here) season, or even restaurant week. Sports seasons and restaurant weeks are concentrated periods of time when Americans get to go all out and indulge in their favorite passion. Whether it be in the sports arena or the realm of gastronomy and good eating, fanatics tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time and money engaged in thinking about, preparing for and engaging in this short-lived, seasonal rite. To bring it to a very local level, wedding season in my village is the equivalent of football season in Pittsburgh. People can't seem to think about anything else.

Similarly, March is the perfect time for Malian men (young and old) to engage in what I like to think of as one of their favorite pastimes: weddings. Rainy season ended last August, the last of the crops were harvested in November, most of the cooking wood has been gathered in the past month, and the temperatures just keep rising. No real work will be done in the fields until at least early June, so with little else to do, and with little desire to do anything else, Malians choose to distract themselves with getting hitched. A friend once told me that the reason Malians have so many children is because they have nothing else to do at night. I think wedding season is just about the same: there's nothing else to do now, so they take advantage of the 4-wife allowance in the Muslim faith and take another wife.

In small villages like mine, every wedding in the village happens on the same day. Anyone who wants to get married has to wait until this specific day to make their union official. People start talking about and preparing for it months in advance. There are bonbon invitations to be distributed, distant relatives who need to be notified, excessive quantities of corn and rice and millet to be pounded, and money to be rounded up. Malian weddings run on a very loose invitation system. In the weeks before the wedding, a member of the family goes around the village passing around candy to people in the village. They'll hand you a piece or two of candy and tell you that this is so-and-so's wedding candy. If you've received candy, you can consider yourself invited and you or someone from your family is expected to attend. Nothing more needs to be said. It's very confusing to Americans who are used to formal, typed invitations and specifics about who, what, where, and when.

On the other hand, much like their American equivalent, Malian weddings are expensive affairs. That poses a slight problem in country where nobody has any money and everyone is expected to take multiple wives as a sign of age, class, and status. Part of calling the distant relatives, aside from informing them of the event itself, is to ask for a financial contribution. Oftentimes, distant relative means educated and well-placed relative, someone in a position to offer significant financial support. When all is said and done, a bride can cost a groom's family upwards of $600, a sum that very few Malians can muster up on their own. Above and beyond the liquid cash offered to the bride's family, Malian husbands are expected to offer their wives much, much more: A friend of mine is in the process of getting his younger brother married, and is expected to pay the bride's family 175,000CFA (about $300). He's also expected to bring them: 17 brand new outfits, 5 pairs of matching shoes, 5 head scarves, 150kg corn, 100kg rice, 1 goat, and 5 chickens. And if that's not enough, a woman also requires a house of her own (basically a one-or two room mud building), a free-standing kitchen hut, and all the equipment to fill both. It's no small undertaking, and for this reason, it's understandable that Malians look to their families and friends for help.

People keep asking me when I'm going to get married. At almost 26, I'm too old not to be married. A woman at a wedding last week actually laughed at me when I told her I wasn't married -- she didn't believe me! Surely, someone as educated, rich and beautiful as myself MUST be married, n'est pas? The conversation usually goes something like this:

"C'est pas possible!" they tell me. What in the world could I possibly be waiting for, they wonder? I try every excuse I can come up with, but they still have trouble understanding why I'm single.

"I'm still a kid", I say. They laugh. Malian women, especially those in small villages, often have two or more kids by the time they're my age.

"I haven't found a good job yet". They tell me I won't need one; that's what a good husband is for. I cringe. I'd like to be able to provide for myself, thankyouverymuch.

They sigh and conclude, "It must be that you must not like Malian men. That's it, isn't it? Your parents must have one waiting for you in America, no? They're going to give you to him when you get back." I shake my head. I tell them in America, we don't give women to men. We're not commodities to be bartered and traded. When I decide to get married, it'll be a mutual decision, not a business transaction.

"You know, it's just not normal for a woman your age to be unmarried. It's just not good". I assure them that I'm OK with it.

But they won't have it: "There are so many great Malian men out there. We're happy to look for one for you. You can even be the second wife". They're trying to flatter me, cajole me, but I won't have any of it. I explain to them the one wife, one husband policy Americans adhere to by law. In Mali, it's customary to be required to accept a first wife that's chosen by your family. That means that you might not always like, or even love her. But men get to choose the second, third and fourth themselves, which means they'll actually like them. I politely decline the offer to be a loved #2.

"If a Malian man can take 4 wives, I want to take 4 husbands", I declare, putting my hands on my hips defiantly. They, of course, laugh, and I continue my explanation, "I need the first one to cook my food, the second to clean my dirty clothes, the third to clean my house, and the fourth to give me foot massages". By this point, they're usually doubled over laughing. "Oh no, no, no. That would never work. The men would kill each other. You simply cannot have four men for one woman. They'd be too jealous". Then why are four wives ok, I ask silently? I'll never get an answer I can understand and agree with for that one, so I let it drop.

I'm an exception to the get-married-early rule because I'm not a Malian woman, but it's true that the modern, educated Malian woman faces an important dilemma. Back in the beginning of my stay here in Mali, I wrote an entry about the a comment the doctor at my health clinic made. His point was that Malian men don't want women who are more educated than they are. I was irate when he said it and thought he was backwards and demoded. I've heard it from lots of other men by now, and I'm starting to understand the social consequences of the phenomenon he's referring to.

In my village, the generation that's of marrying age (both men and women in this case) are uneducated, which doesn't pose a problem for either party when it comes to marriage. They get married, have kids, farm their fields and live happily ever after. But what about the kids (and especially the girls) who are currently in school? Do they stand a chance of finding a partner in village? Especially the girls, who are usually expected to marry older men? Educated women are often schooled in bigger towns and cities, and then married off there, as well. But here's the catch: Mali is still a society in which someone needs to be at home to take care of the housework. With a rampant lack of any and all household technology, all tasks are done painstakingly by hand. Food is cooked over a wood or charcoal fire, clothes are cleaned by hand, water either pulled from the well, or pumped from a communal source, food bought fresh daily in market, and the house and yard need to be swept out twice daily because the dust from the dirt roads gets kicked up by passing cars and motorcycles, coating everything with a thin film of grit. Someone absolutely needs to be home to keep the place standing. Gender roles are firm here, and this role always falls to women here in Mali, leaving them little time for an education or work outside the home.

Married life in Mali is both a curse and a blessing. The majority of Malian women find themselves married and without work outside the home, and thus with no financial contribution to offer their families. The men see this as a blessing for the women, because according to them, this lessens the burden on the woman, an Islamic ideal. I tend to see it as locking women into a situation that they may or may not have chosen or even enjoy. Divorce is almost unheard of in Mali, and because children are the property of the father, divorced women (a rare breed, for understandable reasons) are required to leave their children with their father. These divorced women are not desirable, and have a very small chance of remarrying, thus essentially becoming a burden to their families because they cannot contribute financially. But the exact reason a woman can't contribute financially is because her family chose to sacrifice her education in hopes of finding her a suitable husband, which she no longer has.

So where does that leave the state of women and education in Mali? Probably about where America was about 50 years ago, although even then, I'm pretty sure American women weren't being deprived of an education. They just weren't allowed to do anything with it once they got it. Thankfully, America moved forward, and Mali is slowly following suit. Women still find themselves in a bind: those who want to get married early are refused an education, and those who want to get married at all are not encouraged to search advanced or terminal degrees. Overly educated women supposedly pose a threat to the equilibrium of a marriage, as they risk making more than their husbands, which will logically lead them to disobey him and refuse to remain his subordinate. Women with brains are undesirable. A strong woman is intimidating. What does that say about Malian men?

With all this said, Malian men don't seem to be having a problem finding women to marry. That may not say much for the state of girl's education here, but it does make a very busy period in the lives of my villagers between the months of March to May. I went to my first wedding extravaganza a few weeks ago and needed a few days after to recover from the lack of sleep. When I jokingly asked the groom (a friend of mine) when wife number three would be arriving, he resolutely responded that after this (#2), there won't be any more. "The money's all gone - weddings are expensive, and two wives are enough". "Just give it a few months", his friends chimed in, "things will cool down, you'll get bored, and you'll change your mind. You'll come around", they assured him. Maybe he'll have a few extra dollars under his mattress in a year or two, and a month or two to spare planning for the event, and will decide to find himself another wife. Because, really, what else will he have to do after the harvest and before the following rainy season?